Saturday, April 23, 2011

Greetings From Indianapolis

This will be a quickie because we have just spent an absolutely lovely evening with my friend Deborah and her family, who fed us lots of pasta and salads and pie, let us play with their dogs, and put up with fannish squealing about various movies, TV shows, and video games from various people present. We arrived at their home in Bloomington after a harrowing car ride through flooding Indiana, which was inundated with rain today -- several inches in places, causing flooding on some highway ramps.

We visited Purdue in the morning in drizzle that turned quickly into thunderstorms -- we spent an hour at the engineering school information session, then took a walking tour of the engineering facilities huddling under umbrellas and hoods when we had to go from building to building. We had a fantastic lunch at the student union -- I had a veggie Thai noodle bowl. The campus is very pretty, with lots of flowering trees and azaleas at this time of year, but visibility was so bad at times that we couldn't see the stadiums. Here are a few photos of Boilermaker pride:

Amelia Earhart was on Purdue's faculty as a lecturer and adviser to female students, and Purdue in turn provided the Electra in which she tried to fly around the world.

Amelia's Cafe in one of the engineering buildings honors her legacy.

The cafe and this replica of the Apollo 1 capsule are in Neil Armstrong Hall. Apparently one of the older buildings used to have a plaque that said that before Armstrong could walk on the moon, he had to walk into Purdue's thermodynamics classroom.

Another building has a moon rock donated by NASA and the widow of Roger Chaffee, a Purdue alumnus like Armstrong.

Many astronauts have graduated from Purdue as well as thousands of other engineers from fifteen disciplines.

The water in this fountain is used to cool the particle accelerator on campus. Students are therefore forbidden to shower in it.

We saw the campus only under the grayest skies...

...yet it was still apparent how pretty the central quadrangles are.

This bust of Abraham Lincoln is in the student union because President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862, giving 17.4 million acres of land for the establishment of colleges to teach agriculture and mechanics. Purdue University was established in 1869, opening its doors in 1874 and admitting women in 1875.